| ============ |
| Introduction |
| ============ |
| |
| This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well |
| as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS) |
| protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block |
| (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early |
| PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now |
| called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.1 |
| the most current dialect) is strongly preferred over using older |
| dialects like CIFS due to security reasons. All modern dialects, |
| including the most recent, SMB3.1.1, are supported by the CIFS VFS |
| module. The SMB3 protocol is implemented and supported by all major |
| file servers such as Windows (including Windows 2019 Server), as |
| well as by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server |
| support and tools for Linux and many other operating systems). |
| Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as do most Network Attached |
| Storage vendors, so this network filesystem client can mount to a |
| wide variety of systems. It also supports mounting to the cloud |
| (for example Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security |
| features. |
| |
| The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network |
| file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced |
| security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better |
| POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption, |
| high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet |
| signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization |
| improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support the |
| CIFS Unix extensions, and the Linux client also supports SMB3 POSIX extensions, |
| the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and |
| cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments, |
| not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments. |
| |
| This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space |
| tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from |
| |
| https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git |
| |
| or |
| |
| git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git |
| |
| mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers. |
| |
| For more information on the module see the project wiki page at |
| |
| https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS |
| |
| and |
| |
| https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils |
